Visual Futures: Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice

The overall subject of the book is visual culture. What sets it apart and gives it such an original emphasis is its multi-disciplinarity and the range of critical voices, ranging through film studies, architecture, creative practice, biology, pedagogy and media theory, which are brought to bear upon the question of visuality and its relationship to futurity. 

In our everyday lives, we navigate across a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet, we rarely pause to question how or why we derive meaning from this sea. Nor do we typically contemplate the impact that it has on our motivations, our assumptions about science and about other people, and our actions as individuals and collectives. This book is a collection of interdisciplinary perspectives, from science to film, from graffiti and virtual environments to architecture and education that examines the ways in which we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments.

Visual Futures provides an interdisciplinary examination of how we visualize and use visuals to make meaning within our environment. A diverse range of contributions and perspectives from biology, film, virtual reality, urban graffiti, architecture, critical pedagogy and education challenge our current attitudes, norms and practices of looking and seeing, opening up questions about the future. The future is a concept with significant political stakes and the work of rethinking and reimagining possible worlds requires a host of practices, which include the work of seeing, of image-making and of representation – all of which is political work taken up by the book contributors.

Primary readership will be among scholars and students of visual culture, media studies, digital cultures, fine art, architecture, education, science communication and sociology. Clearly aimed at an academic readership, it will also appeal to practising artists, architects, software developers and educators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789384482

Book preview

Visual Futures

Visual Futures

Exploring the Past, Present, and

Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice

EDITED BY

Tracey Bowen and Brett R. Caraway

First published in the UK in 2021 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2021 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2021 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Frontispiece: Valencia Street, San Francisco.

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Print ISBN 978-1-78938-446-8

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Contents

List of Figures

1.See and See Again: Mapping the Fractures in Visual Culture

Brett R. Caraway and Penny Kinnear

2.In Between Whiteness: Pierre Bourdieu and Rudolph Valentino, An Unlikely Pairing

Elizabeth Peden

3.Ink to Inkling: Artful Messages in the Visuals of Biology

Charudatta Navare

4.Visualizing Gentrification: Resistance and Reclamation Through the Writing on the Walls

Tracey Bowen

5.Intentional Viewing: Decoding, Learning, and Creating Culturally Relevant Architecture

Matthew Dudzik and Marilyn Corson Whitney

6.Visualizing Art-Science Entanglements for More Habitable Futures

Kylie Caraway

7.Seeing, Sensing, and Surrendering the Inside: Expressions of the Adolescent Self in a Structured Illustrative Disclosure

Edie Lanphar and Phil Fitzsimmons

8.Picturing the State of Visual Literacy Initiatives Today

Dana Statton Thompson

Afterword: To Visualize the Future Is Political Work

Danielle Taschereau Mamers

Notes on Contributors

Figures

2.1Rudolph Valentino, The Bronze Collar, Exhibitor’s Trade Review, Mar-May 1925, Media History Digital Library.

2.2Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayers in a scene from The Sheik (1921), Core Collection. Production files, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

2.3Evelyn Keyes in an advertisement for Lux Soap, Photoplay, November 1947, v.3, no. 6, p. 32. Media History Digital Library.

3.1One of Paul Ehrlich’s drawings, depicting his theory of antibody formation. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Reproduced under creative commons license Attribution 4.0 International: CC BY 4.0.

3.2RGB color model represented as a cube (on the left), and Hue, Saturation, and Value represented as a cylinder (on the right). Images from Wikimedia Commons, represented here in grayscale. Credits: SharkD. Reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

3.3An example image showing the interaction between normal prion protein, shown using green circles, and infectious prion protein, depicted using red spiked circles. Image from Wikimedia Commons. Credits: Tecywiz121. Image under the public domain, represented here in grayscale.

3.4A typical diagram of fertilization. Figure under the public domain, adapted from Wikimedia Commons. Reproduced here in grayscale. Credits: LadyofHats.

3.5Analysis of shapes of the components. Pattern refers to antibodies, sperm, or infectious prion being depicted using more pointed shapes than antigen, egg, or normal prion protein.

3.6Analysis of hue of the components.

4.1Clarion Alley, San Francisco, California.

4.2This city is not for sale, Ivy Jeanne McClellend, 2014.

4.3Everything must go, Daniel Doherty, 2015.

4.4Valencia Street, San Francisco.

4.5On the ground, sidewalk stencils, Valencia Street.

4.6Chicano Park, San Diego.

4.7Mural and graffiti bordering Chicano Park.

5.1Hsu-Jen Huang. Travel Sketches. 2019. Watercolor sketches. Courtesy of Artist.

5.2Matthew Dudzik. Shifting Perspectives: Mexican Identity. 2017. Photomontage. Courtesy of Artist.

5.3Matthew Dudzik. Alternative Realities. 2010. Photomontage. Courtesy of Artist.

5.4Felipe Palacio Trujillo. Polyphony. 2018. Unreal Engine video stills. Courtesy of Artist.

6.1Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park.

6.2Krista Matias speaking about Sequoia National Park.

6.3Douglas squirrel barking at visitors in Sequoia National Park.

6.4Sequoia tree in General Grant Grove.

6.5Setting up the 360° camera in Sequoia National Park.

6.6Digital ecosystem.

6.7Various perspectives in the ecosystem. From left corner, clockwise human digital perspective, squirrel perspective, mushroom perspective, tree perspective, ecology perspective.

7.1A middle school student’s schematic representation of self.

8.1Basic dimensions of visual literacy (left) and differentiation of sub-competencies (right) of the CEFR–VL competency model.

8.2Jacob Burns Film Center Learning Framework.

8.3The Art of Seeing Art™.

1

See and See Again: Mapping the Fractures in Visual Culture

Brett R. Caraway, University of Toronto Mississauga and Penny Kinnear, University of Toronto

Visual studies has weathered questions for some time now regarding its status as an academic discipline, a subset discipline, an interdisciplinary field, or a loose intellectual movement. Its object of study, its approach, and its associated methodologies continue to inspire weighty debates. These discussions are especially germane today given the ascendance of a post-truth political culture in which emotional appeals and repeated soundbites often garner more influence than factual rebuttals and policy discussions. These developments draw attention to the rhetorical aspects of communication practices and technologies. Contemporary media systems are characterized by a variety of modes including video, images, narration, dialogue, score, text, animation, virtual and augmented realities, broadcasting, and interactivity. In each of these, visuality and visual practice play an important role. This is not to suggest that ours is the first age in which visuality has served as an effective conduit for persuasion or the exercise of power. Yet the way in which today’s assemblage of media generates representations, independent of referents—what Metz (1982) refers to as scopic regime—is both historically unique and dynamic. The scopic regime compels us to observe and resist the limits to its own horizon of imagination. Its particularities necessitate an approach to visuality and visual practice that is stubbornly recursive in its investigation of the social conditioning of the visual and the visual conditioning of the social. While the predominance of the visual and ways of seeing in contemporary media are up for debate, ignoring them is not.

In this book, we confront the visual as an instrument of ideology, conditioning our understanding of the world. So conceived, the visual constitutes not just an object to be seen, but a lens through which we perceive and understand the world around us. Ideologies are constituted through these systems of representation. Through them we live out our imaginary relations to the conditions of our existence (Althusser, 2006; Hall, 1985). They are the semiotic systems by which we represent the world to ourselves and one another (Hall, 1985, p. 102). Visuality, understood as a means of seeing and being seen, influences culture by fabricating worlds bearing some resemblance to our own. Through them, we are invited to attach meaning (signified) to the sights and sounds (signifiers) we encounter there. Thus, ideology functions to the extent that the link between signified and signifier is successfully managed, allowing a desired range of meanings to be transmitted and reproduced.

According to Althusser (1971), ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, creating a dichotomy between the abstract and concrete aspects of social relations (p. 162). This dichotomy can be understood partly in terms of structure wherein individual consciousness is, to some degree, conditioned by the social relations in which it finds itself. But the contingent nature of this conditioning speaks to the other side of the dichotomy between abstract and concrete realties. Just as the visual may serve as a conduit of domination, it may also serve as a means of resistance and negotiation. Hall (1999) famously characterized this contingent process of meaning-making as encoding and decoding. Hence, Hall (1985) understood ideology as indeterminate, open-ended, and contingent (p. 95). That is to say, there is no necessary correspondence between ideology on the one hand and individual consciousness or social relations on the other. It is our position that visuality exists in the liminal space between encoding and decoding, between structure and agency. Or as Mitchell (2002) argues, images are best understood as both tools for manipulation and autonomous sources of meaning: This approach would treat visual culture and visual images as go-betweens in social transactions, as a repertoire of screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human beings (p. 175). Such an approach deftly avoids reductive and deterministic understandings of visual practice as a raw exercise of domination by envisioning it instead as an open-ended and forward-looking inquiry into the power relations undergirding visual culture.

The attempt to manage visuality and visual practice so as to arrive at a desired range of meanings is what gives structure to the scopic regime. The relative degrees of autonomy between structure and agency register the intensity of the unavoidable contradiction embedded in any ideology. Ideology may alternately withstand a hairline fracture or it may crumble from a comminuted fracture. In either case, it is our task to map these fractures—the points at which the correspondence between encoding and decoding break down. Perhaps the scopic regime loses shape as attempts are made to accommodate a diverse range of perspectives. Or perhaps it finds a way to repeatedly overcome and adapt to its own contradictions. As Fleckenstein (2007) reminds us, multiple scopic regimes may exist simultaneously as competing ways of seeing clash and contend for organizational power within a culture (p. 14). Exploring the nonalignment of perspectives provides us with opportunities for both ideological critique and creative response. As Hageman (2013) contends, contradictions are spaces within ideology where new subjectivities might be produced: new constructions of and relationships between individual subjects and the social totality (p. 65).

It is in this spirit that the current volume explores visuality and visual practice. The title Visual Futures speaks to this agenda of forward-looking and open-ended investigation of visuality and visual practice. By visuality and visual practice we do not assert a primacy of the visual in contemporary culture. In keeping with Bal (2003), we are concerned instead with particular ways of seeing, the visual quality of objects, and how each of these confront a variety of social constituencies. Our investigations consider the processes by which objects are visually assembled, transmitted, and ultimately reassembled. Yet this collection is also about more than criticism. In critiquing the ways in which visuality and visual practice are put to use, there is an implicit recognition that these processes are implicated in shaping the future. What is happening in the present gives rise to a future—hence the Futures in the title. Here we take inspiration from the field of futures studies, which leaves both terms in the plural, signaling a democratic and inclusive sensibility. Futures studies is a transdisciplinary field with roots in philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and pedagogy that contemplates not just one kind of future but many (Gidley, 2017). It makes value judgements about impending futures and considers how to forestall undesirable outcomes (p. 64); it cultivates creativity and engagement with multiple perspectives (p. 69); and it facilitates empowerment and transformation through engagement and participation (p. 70). Accordingly, we start with a set of guiding principles regarding the relationship of visuality and visual practice to the future: (1) we believe it is necessary to orientate people in the present so they can start to think about the future; (2) some futures are probable, some are desirable, and some are less desirable; and (3) visions of the future condition both present and future action (Bell, 2017). In this way, the current collection uses critique as a means to orientate readers in the present moment while the open-endedness of the investigations invites normative prescriptions on the best ways forward.

The origins of this book extend back more than a decade. The work contained within is the product of a diverse group of artists, educators, and scholars whose primary objective has been to develop a multidisciplinary research agenda focusing on visuality and visual practice. From 2007 to 2016, this group came together each year at Oxford University in a small gathering where the emphasis was on facilitating intense discussions among individuals from a broad range of academic disciplines and artistic backgrounds. The first gathering was called the Global Conference on Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues. It was limited to only 30 participants, all of whom had answered a call for Perspectives […] from those engaged in the fields of education, visual arts, fine arts, literature, philosophy, psychology, critical theory and theology […] from any area, profession and vocation in which visual literacy plays a part. That original call delivered a fortuitous gathering of academics and creators. The most recent gathering was recommenced in 2018, this time as the Visual Futures Through International Perspectives: A Dialogic Compendium on Visuality and Visual Practice symposium, giving rise to this collected volume. The newly inaugurated gathering took place at the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Coach House. Established in 1963, the McLuhan Coach House has a long history of facilitating debate and dialogue about contemporary issues and the impact of technology on culture. Fittingly, participants were asked to focus on one of the following three questions:

1. How are visuality and the visual provoking a new kind of economy or cultural exchange?

2. What are the relationships, intersections, and collisions between visuality and/or visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection, educative practices, civic development, social development, human geographies, indoctrination, spirituality, ecology, wellness, building and construction, migration, and unplugging?

3. How do you visualize the future? This section requires a ‘social imaginary’ reflection concerning possible implications for the future in regard to (but not limited to): education, sociology, psychology, literature, technology, architecture, and philosophy.

A number of interweaving threads emerged from the two days of presentations. The threads came in the form of questions about seeing. Who sees? Who can see? What can be seen? What is unseen? What are the images we produce? How do we produce them? What is brought closer and what is obfuscated or erased in those images? What is visual practice? What are the ethics of visual practices? Sometimes these questions confronted the collisions of culture(s), identities, and power. They all challenged our assumptions and definitions of what seeing entails and how it is accomplished. One certainty did emerge—visual practices are more than visual culture or visual literacy. Before we can consider the implications of visual culture or literacy, we must understand how we practice and engage with all of our ways of seeing.

This book attempts to capture some of the spirit of those presentations and dialogues. Fundamentally, it is composed of seven chapters derived from the work of a group of participants in the Visual Futures symposium. But it is also much more than that. We have attempted to replicate the role of discussant by including an afterword by Danielle Taschereau Mamers, one of our participants at the gathering. As of this writing, Taschereau Mamers is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. Much like the Visual Futures group itself, the Jackman Humanities Institute emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to understand human experience by generating new networks for research and study. Similarly, this book encapsulates a diverse collection of scholarship, reflecting the content and style of the conference. Moreover, our discussant responds to the synergies created among the chapters and the authors’ perspectives, drawing out questions—questions that we hope will provide momentum to propel us into subsequent Visual Futures symposia.

As a collection, the following chapters are also reflective of some of the larger trends in approaches to information and media literacy. Over the last decade or so, there has been a noticeable rhetorical shift in the discourse surrounding visual literacy. Not too long ago, media literacy programs and initiatives were chiefly concerned with media access as a function of physical infrastructure, technical proficiency, and critical awareness of embedded meanings. Since the advent of the internet, digital content, online social media, and user-generated content, a growing emphasis has been placed on people as active producers of media content. This broadening of our understanding of media literacy is likewise reflected in this book. The important work of decoding the underlying meanings that are part and parcel of visual culture is still front and center. Yet these chapters also move fluidly into analyses of the creative process itself, confronting it both as a domain of struggle against dominant ideology and the scopic regime, and as a domain of contemplation, self-awareness, and empathy.

Elizabeth Peden kicks things off with an examination of the visual construction of race. In her chapter, In between whiteness: Pierre Bourdieu and Rudolph Valentino, an unlikely pairing, Peden asks how individuals seen as racially ambiguous navigate these social constructions to achieve recognition and success. In doing so, she illuminates the means by which ideology becomes naturalized and unseen, making it all the more potent. Peden employs Bourdieu’s work on systems of classification to show how individuals and groups have navigated and struggled over racial divisions, vying for social recognition. She focuses on the large population of Southern Italians who immigrated to the United States during the early twentieth century. There was considerable apprehension about race and immigration during this period, and Southern Italians were often perceived as racially ambiguous. The boundaries of whiteness were—and perhaps still are—dynamic and an object of struggle. It was not immediately clear whether Southern Italian immigrants should be considered white or nonwhite. Peden shows how the inconsistency in social categorization implied by racial ambiguity is evidence of the contingent nature of systems of social control. Peden notes the important role of Hollywood silent film in the early twentieth century and reveals how it served as an arena of racial domination and contestation. Using Southern Italian immigrant and Hollywood star Rudolph Valentino as a case study, Peden shows how the famous actor was able to cut across racial lines while navigating his own racial ambiguity. She argues that silent film mediated between individual agency and social constraint for people seen as racially ambiguous. Peden illuminates the political and social mores of the time, while giving us much to consider about the visual representation of race in contemporary contexts.

Charudatta Navare usefully draws our attention to the ways in which meaning has been embedded in visual content at the intersection of art and science in his chapter "Ink to inkling: Artful